Microsoft Phil Harrison interview – ‘absolutely no plans at all’ for Xbox One without Kinect

GameCentral speaks to the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Xbox business, about the Xbox One’s troubled unveiling and the future of Kinect.

It’s not so long ago that Phil Harrison was the frontman for Sony’s E3 and Gamescom conferences. But despite a long and illustrious career as the president of Sony Worldwide Studios (the role now occupied by Shuhei Yoshida) he left the company in 2008. After a few wilderness years at Atari he moved to the other side of the fence and became corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB).

In other words he’s a very important man, with decade’s worth of experience in the video games industry. And so at Gamescom we asked Harrison about how Microsoft had got itself into so much trouble with the Xbox One’s unveiling and whether it can overcome the PlayStation 4’s head start in popularity. We’ll leave it to you to judge how well he answered those questions…

GC: Is there anything now that remains of the console you originally unveiled in May? It seems that in terms of its attitude towards consumers, games makers, and even retailers this is an almost entirely different proposition than you originally started out with.

PH: The philosophy of the platform is the same. Yes, we’ve made a few modifications to our policy in reaction and response to feedback that we got on our programme. And that was valuable feedback, but the vision of building a great place to play games and a great place to experience all forms of entertainment in one place remains true.

I think what you’d have seen since our announcement back in May is two very big games focused events at E3 and Gamescom. Our intention around these two events is to clearly show the world that Xbox One has the most incredible line-up of games, ever. And is the place to play triple-A franchises.

And now, with our independent developer programme, the place where all kinds of creativity can show up. That doesn’t mean we are less committed to our vision but we also recognise that the first people who are going to but an Xbox One this holiday are most likely to be gamers.

GC: But I don’t understand where those initial policies came from. I don’t understand how you personally, who have so much experience in the games industry, could have thought they’d be accepted. I don’t understand how your market research could have failed so catastrophically, when five minutes with a tape recorder at any game shop would’ve avoided all that trouble. Do you now view those initial policies to be wrong and that your eyes have been opened? Were you genuinely surprised they caused the reaction they did?

PH: What we have done is very clearly give gamers a choice. They can choose to buy content on disk and have all of the advantages they have enjoyed form disk-based games over the previous generation. Those advantages will continue in terms of trading, lending, sharing… all of the things that you can do with a disk. That will continue.

On Xbox One we also have a way for customers to buy a game digitally through our marketplace. And consumers can choose, and I think that is a very progressive place to be. I think that players will make their choice as to how they want to consume content, and that’s up to them because our platform supports both.

GC: But for better or worse – and in many gamers’ eyes it was worse – there was a sense of leadership and vision there at the beginning. It was a genuinely different console than we’d seen before. How do you convince people that you still have a clear and distinctive vision when all your major policies are being dictated by Sony and by your own fans.

PH: Well, let’s…

GC: Because you wouldn’t have made those changes if Sony hadn’t had the E3 they did. I was there, at their media briefing, and they were chanting Sony’s name – and it wasn’t because they loved Sony, it was because they hated your policies.

PH: Well, let’s celebrate the fact that our fans our passionate and care deeply about the products we build. I think that’s wonderful. But our role and responsibility as a platform holder, as a designer and a builder of a platform, is to make sure that the best developer and publishers create the best games on our platform and show up in a unique and ideally exclusive way.

And what we showed at E3, and what we showed here today, is that we have the best line-up in history. That we have the strongest powerhouse franchises showing up in unique and exclusive ways on our platform. That that will represent value for gamers by bundling FIFA 14, where the new home of football is on Xbox, new and exclusive content from Call Of Duty, and from all of the developers and publishers that you see around this room great game experiences for our launch line-up. That’s ultimately what is the most important thing.

FIFA 14: Ultimate Team Legends – another key exclusive for Microsoft

GC: Can you guarantee, as much as anyone can, that there’ll be no more U-turns? I hear from a lot of people now who say ‘I might get an Xbox One now, but I’ll wait for one that doesn’t have Kinect in the box’. Can you say that that absolutely will not happen?

PH: We love the strategy, we love the platform that we’re building. Gamers are telling us that we have a great platform, the media are telling us that we have a great platform – with over 100 awards for our platform, more than twice as many as any other platform coming out of E3 – including the most awarded game in the history of E3, which is Titanfall. It’s the games that matters.

GC: But I can’t get you on a yes or no for that question? Can you not say that for the first year at least, for example, there will be no Kinect-less bundle?

PH: Absolutely no plans at all. We think Kinect is an integral part of our platform. All of the magical experiences that you get, both as a games-player and also the way you navigate the system are made even more amazing because of Kinect.

GC: But on Kinect, we’ve still seen relatively little of it. It was only briefly highlighted at the unveiling and was almost entirely ignored at E3. And even here [at Gamescom] Kinect Sports Rivals is the only Kinect-only game on show. Is that an indication of the proportion of games that will be Kinect-only going forward?

PH: We have shown how Kinect makes the navigation of the system, and the entertainment of the system, more amazing using your voice. A lot of what we showed at our reveal back in May was voice-controlled, which is only possible through Kinect. We showed some gesture-based experiences at E3…

GC: But in terms of games there’s been very little.

PH: There are a number of games here. Spark has unique Kinect features, Forza has Kinect, Ryse: Son Of Rome has Kinect voice in it, Kinect Sports Rivals is clearly built exclusively as a Kinect title and I think you will agree looks amazing and has a great feature in being able to put you inside the game. And because every single console has a Kinect with it that means the developers can target the widest possible install base with their games.

GC: Do you feel that Kinect is the hardest sell for Xbox One, in terms of gamers? Many view it, at best, as a distraction for developers. They think that without that they could’ve had another level or more content of some other kind. You must view that as a problem, in terms of perception if nothing else?

PH: I’m in a privileged and relatively unique position because I have an Xbox One in my house. And I know that that is not something necessarily to brag about. But there is something truly magical about walking into the room and saying, ‘Xbox One’. And my machine recognises me, because I’ve allowed it to.

It turns on my console, it uses identity to make sure my content is displayed on my home screen – my entertainment choices, my game choices, the last things I was playing, are shown off on my home screen. Whereas someone else in my family comes on and switches on their content it will show up. Those benefits are harder to talk about, but when you experience them they are truly magical.

GC: Okay, but that has nothing to do with games. Is that a tacit admission that Kinect as a primary games controller is a flawed concept, in terms of creating titles for core games?

PH: We think that whether it’s a gesture, a very subtle gesture like touching your head to bring up some additional context in the game, or using your body to lean while playing a controller-based game… We have a demonstration of that at the far end of the room, by the way – I’d go and check it out. [He’s referring to tech demo Reflex, which you can read about here – GC]

We think these augmented experiences, where you have a controller-based game which is made better because you have Kinect at the same time… on Killer Instinct the fact that the controller binding works automatically when you hand the controller to someone else on the sofa…

GC: I’ve just come from seeing that actually.

PH: Those are things that have real value and real benefits to players. And that’s before we start talking about being able to have a Skype video call with somebody. Being able to use your voice to control an army, to being able to very simply navigate a user interface using your hands – like we have on Kinect Sports Rivals. Not all Kinect experiences have to be you jumping around your living room. And in fact we demonstrate with Kinect Sports Rivals that you can play the entire game sitting down.

Is Kinect an asset or a liability?

GC: Your very austere attitude towards indie gaming at the unveiling is another policy that seemed to come out of nowhere, and immediately earned you lots of negative comments from indie developers. But even with the U-turn does that not put you well behind the curve in terms of Sony and even Nintendo’s timetable? Isn’t it going to take you a long time to catch up now?

PH: We have, I think, the best independent developer credentials of any platform in the console space, in history. More than 200 developers have launched over 400 games on Xbox 360, representing over a billion dollars in sales. No other platform can match that for numbers of games, total value, value per game.

We have proven that we have a great way of engaging with independent developer community, but we wanted to take it a step further with Xbox One. We designed our platform with this in mind, the way our operating system it specifically unlocks a lot of the features we’re talking about.

The way we put discoverability into our platform. The way we put into our modern marketplace recommendation, and trending and spotlights that will allow you as gamer to connect with the best games. And the inverse is true, that you as a developer can connect with the biggest audience in the most frictionless way possible. The fact that we’re announcing it here today is just part of our planning processing. Remember, we haven’t launched yet.

GC: Yeah, yeah. But that was not what you said back in May. What you said in May was the exact opposite of your position now, so how is that part of the planning process?

PH: I can absolutely confirm that our intention from the beginning of our platform was to open up our platform to the widest possible set of creators. So they can bring their creativity and magic to gamers.

GC: OK. Another aspect which must be close to your heart, and which began before you joined Microsoft, is the recent move away from first party games – where every year Microsoft has seemed to publish, and certainly develop, less and less game themselves. What was the thinking there and are you confident you’ll be able to ramp up quickly enough for the Xbox One?

PH: So, we have more exclusive titles in development than at any time in our history. We’re starting new studios, we’re investing in new studios all around the world. We continue to grow our studios in the UK, with Rare and Lionhead and Soho Productions and Lift London, all of whom are creating magical experiences on Xbox One and the cloud and TV.

We’ve unveiled here in Germany two UK-based studios’ products, really for the first time – in Kinect Sports Rivals from Rare, which is just magical, and Lionhead sharing for the first time anywhere in the world what they’re doing with Fable Legends. We’ve hired some amazing talent into our Lionhead organisation that really understand online gaming…

GC: Is this expansion something you were personally involved in? Did you turn up on your first day and say, ‘We’ve got to reverse this trend of moving away from first party titles. We’ve got to have more internal development’.

PH: We have never retreated from any type of internal development at all, we continue to invest worldwide. Microsoft Studios as an organisation is growing globally. Sure, one of the reasons I was hired is to help grow our European business, that’s why I’m here. And I think we demonstrated some really positive strides with that. So I think we’ve got some amazing talent in our organisation that’s gonna be a great thing for our platform.

GC: And just an aside as I leave. You mentioned the FIFA 14 deal was while stocks last, have you any idea how long that might be?

PH: I do not. So it’s all pre-orders to date and while stocks last, going forward. There will be other value bundles that we make announcements about in due course. But FIFA 14…

GC: Presumably you’re hoping for a month or two’s worth of stock at least?

PH: I don’t have the specifics of it, it’s incredible value and we would encourage people to go out and pre-order.